Facebook and Salesforce have come up with a new way to help businesses target just the right ads to just the right people on Facebook.
One of the new things Salesforce announced this week at its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco is something called the "Salesforce Marketing Cloud." This is essentially the combination of the two social media companies Salesforce acquired this year, Radian6 and Buddy Media. Marketing Cloud lets companies launch ad campaigns on Facebook and other social sites.
One new feature of Marketing Cloud is the ability to sift through customers' email addresses and phone numbers stored on Salesforce.com to find their Facebook and Twitter handles.
Today the two companies have announced the next step: Marketing Cloud is being integrated into Facebook’s new custom audience targeting feature, launched earlier this month. This means Salesforce customers can now send very targeted ads to people on Facebook. They can sift through emails addresses and phone numbers of customer data stored on Salesforce, find those folks on Facebook, and have Facebook send only those people a special ad.
Plus, the two companies beefed up their partnership. Salesforce just became one of the first crop of companies named to the "strategic level" of Facebook PMD program. This will give Salesforce early access to Facebook's upcoming product tests and better customer support.
The two companies have been tight for ages. As we previously reported, it was at Facebook CIO Tim Campos' urging that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff bought a company called Rypple. Rypple has now become Salesforce's Work.com service and has sent SuccessFactors into a whole new market: human resources software.
Icing on the cake for Benioff is that Facebook snubbed Oracle. Oracle's newly acquired company, Vitrue, wasn't on the "strategic level" list.
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